A Life Change
by Stark'sGirl
Summary: When Tony Stark's life is completely changed by his own mistake, the destiny seems to have another things reserved for him. The meet with a group of mutants might change his life even more than it already was.
1. Chapter 1

**A/N: **This idea came into my mind after I've seen the IM3 trailer. It is a totally AU story. Excuse the probably grammar mistakes but English is not my first language.

**Feedback: **It is more than welcome. Either good or bad.

White. It was all the man's eyes could see. The white walls with a hint of silver seemed to be the creepiest thing he had ever seen. His eyes took in the surroundings and he could feel a frown creep over his forehead. He didn't understand a single thing from what happened. Where was he? The place seemed as a hospital but the smell didn't match. Why was he there? And the main problem was, why was he cuffed to the bed?

24 HOURS EARLIER

Tony Stark sat on his comfortable, leather chair in the basement of his mansion. He stared blankly at a vial he held in his hand, twirling it around his fingers with a loud sigh. He had been doing the same things since a hour ago. His dark, almond colored eyes meeting the crystalline blue liquid from the vial. The liquid that could change his life. In good or in bad.

Stark let out a resigned sigh and stood up from the chair. 'That's it, Tony,' he thought and opened the lowest drawer of his desk. He took out a tiny, velvet covered box and opened it with a single finger. He couldn't find a reasonable thought to explain his actions, he just knew it was right. He hopped it was.

His fingers wrapped around the cold syringe and trailed its needle with a finger before he picked it up from the velvet box. He opened the vial's lid and stuck the needle inside it before slowly dragging out the syringe. He stared at it for a second before he rose the sleeve of his undershirt. The same black one he wore under the Iron Man armor.

'Jarvis,' he began and stared up at the ceiling. 'Turn on the vital checking system and, don't let anyone to come in. Not even Pepper.' The billionaire finished his sentence as he entered the syringe needle in his purplish veins.

He drew in a sharp breath as the last drop of liquid made contact with his blood steam. His almond colored eyes widened visibly and the hand in which he held the syringe fell limp, trailing his arm and his sides lightly. The syringe fell to the floor with a soft thump and was soon followed by a louder, heavier thump before the world faded to black for him.

'Tony,' the thick American accent of the a man made Stark's head fall to side. 'Tony, wake up,' the man continued and only then Tony opened his eyes.

'What the hell happened?' Stark muttered as his eyes fixed on the concerned faces of his best friend, James Rhodes and his personal assistant, Pepper Potts.

'You passed out,' the gentle feminine voice responded. 'I told you that you should rest more and leave the work for another days.'

To the two concerned peoples surprise, Stark remained silent. He simply stood up from the couch he didn't remembered that he laid on. He saw the concerned faces of the peoples in front of him turn into something else. Into a mixture between surprise, fear and concern. That made Stark step back and he stared down at his hands and ran a hand over his arms.

'Tony,' Pepper was the first to gain the courage to step forward. Her eyes searched his but when she reached them she didn't found the warm, dark colored eyes she had grown to love. She found a pair of cold, electrical blue eyes staring back at her. The same color as the ones of his Iron Man armor eyes. That terrified her. 'Oh God…Tony, what have you done?'

Stark remained silent, taking one more step back until his back touched the cold, crystalline glass of the windows. 'Stay back,' he bite his lower lip gently and held up a hand. It was enough to make the Iron Man hand come to him and throw him out of the window in surprise.

The glass shattered around him and the last thing he could see was the terrified face of the only person he ever cared about more than himself. The delicate features turning into fear as she ran to the now shattered window. The wind blown her hair the same way as it did with his as he fell down from the cliff and toward the sea. He closed his eyes tightly, trying to call the suit to him but it was already too late. Tony Stark fell into the sea, the sound of his fall audible in the silence of the night.

**TBC**

**Hate it, love it, want more of it? Don't worry, the X-Men characters are on their way to come also.**


	2. Chapter 2

**A/N: **Sorry if this chapter was added too late but I currently don't have internet connection and I use my best friends internet two times a week. Thank you for the patience anyways! Hope you'll enjoy this chapter.

This is a short one, mostly from Pepper's thoughts. The part written in _Italian _bolds, is a flashback.

The waves crashed again and again against the huge stone where the Malibu house was placed. The silence of the night creating a terrible pain in the inside of the strawberry blonde woman's heart. Was it even possible, to have a heart ache despite the fact that you are perfectly healthy? She guessed that the pain was only in her disturbed mind. 'God, let it be only a nightmare,' she thought, closing her blue eyes and saying a silent prayer.

God, how much she wished that at the moment, Tony would come behind her as he did every morning and place an innocent kiss on her nape. How much she wished that she'll have the chance to see the sarcasm, playfulness and love in his chocolate eyes. How much she wished that she could get lost in them once again as she did the many times when he spoke about technology and she'd only get out of her trance at the hear of his question mark.

But most of all, she wished that she could touch him again. Feel the warmth of his flesh against her fingertips each time she woke him up when he had a meeting or he fell asleep in his workshop. To hear his voice whining that it was too early to get up yet and that they should lay in the bed a bit more while he'd start to describe each part of her body with sweet words that he knew she hated.

She knew she wasn't perfect even if each time he tried to convince her otherwise. She knew that she was no model and that she was nothing alike the other women he had slept with. She didn't had the perfect sizes that he liked. She wasn't the type of woman that would always agree with him. In fact, she never agreed with him in anything and that was that she loved about him. The fire in his eyes as he tried to prove his point of view. If it would bring him back, she'd even agree with him in anything but she knew it won't. He was gone. Tony Stark left the world. He left his work, his armors, his A.I. and his friends forever. He left a broken woman behind him and a broken friend.

'He's really gone, isn't he?' Pepper managed to choke out as she looked at Rhodes. He had the same expression on his face. He was lost and broken and she saw a rare veil of tears in the black skinned man's eyes. That broke her even more.

'God,' he muttered and ran a hand over his face. He stared at the pieces of broken glass around them. The glass that took away Tony's life. That took him heartlessly away from the world. That was when he remembered an old conversation he had with Tony.

_James Rhodes stared at his friend with a strange expression on his face. His usually full lips being pursed into a tight line and he rubbed a hand over the side of his face as he tried to understand the other man's mentality. Of course, he never could do that. Nobody ever understood Tony Stark at perfection._

'_You want the outside wall made of glass?' the colonel asked with an arched eyebrow. They were sitting on the still unfinished floor of the Malibu residence. The billionaire had taken a few plastic bags and put them on the floor to can sit on them._

'_Yes,' the billionaire nodded firmly and looked at the part of the house where the ocean could be seen. 'I want only windows on the outside walls'_

'_But why?' Rhodes insisted, trying to get a concrete reason why his friend was this decided about it._

'_One, it is modern and I bet no one else has it. Two, the windows bring light. They bring the life inside the house.' _

Rhodes shook his head as the word 'life' replayed in his head with the voice of his friend. The glass, the crystalline glass that Tony loved with such a strange passion was long gone now. The only thing remained from it was the soft glitter that fell on both their faces. Then a serie of questions began to hunt him.

Did Tony felt the pain when he hit the water? Did he fought to don't get dawned as he moved his feet and hands in the few moves he knew to do? Did he screamed as he fell or asked for help? But the thing that haunted him most was the one, could he have saved him if he had thrown on the War Machine armor at the right time? The whole 'what if' problem couldn't give peace to the black skinned man and he felt a half of him drawing as well in the not too cold but neither too warm ocean water. The one that dawned with his best friend and spiritual brother, Tony Stark.


	3. Chapter 3

**A/N: **True, two chapters posted in the same day only because I felt imaginative. By the way, if you wonder how Tony put on his hemlet but not the rest of the armor, is simple. His powers as Extremis were to weak.

Ororo sat on the soft sand of the public beach of Malibu and stared in the upright, at the stone where a house was. She pursed her lips together for a moment and studied the house. The yellowish, warm lights were on and it reminded her of the color of the sunrise. The wide, crystalline windows were glittering into the moon light and that caused a sigh to escape her lips. It was the perfect house out of an American dream thing.

She could have sworn that the peoples who lived there, aside from being rich, were extremely happy. They had a family. Probably they had a dozen of childrens that ran around the huge rooms and filled their emptiness with warm laughter. How much she wished to have a family herself. Two childrens would be enough. She could already imagine them.

They'll be a girl and a boy. The girl would have thick, luxurious silver hair and huge brown eyes with a soft chocolate skin color. The boy, would be totally different. He'd have a luxurious, soft but yet dark hair with blonde reflexes in the sun light. His eyes would be the largest and cute eyes on the Earth. They'd be chocolate brown with a hint of gold and green in them. God, how much she wished that would be thoughts were suddenly interrupted when the ocean brought something on the wet sand. Something strange and also something alive.

Ororo stood up quickly, taking a step closer to the body that was laying on the sand. The waves washed over the person's body and a few 'thumps' could be heard when the water hit…the metal? What was that? Was it a kind of a humanoid bomb or such? She couldn't see the reason why someone would send a bomb to a public beach in the middle of the night. Besides, it was breathing, that meant it was alive.

'Sir?' Ororo called tentatively, taking one more step closer to the body. Only then she saw that the man was wearing an iron hemlet that was colored in red and gold and his right hand was covered with the same thing. 'Probably he wore an armor…' she muttered under her breath and knelt next to the body. Her delicate fingers slowly hovered over the man's hemlet until she found a way to open it. She moved her fingers slowly underneath the hemlet and pushed it up before her brown eyes lowered to the man's face.

He looked mature but he couldn't have more than forty years. There were lines of age coming from his eyes and deeper lines on his forehead. He had dark brown hair that was wet from perspiration because the water couldn't have come inside the hemlet. His lips were quivering and had a strange purplish color from the cold. His nosrils were moving with each breath he took and his chest…There was something on his chest. Something that was glowing. Or better said, inside it.

Ororo moved her hand from his face and slowly over his neck to the middle of his chest. She gasped a bit too loud when she felt metal underneath. So, the source of the blue light was the metal under his shirt. What could that be? Maybe he was one of those strange creatures that she was reading about in the newspapers. Those aliens but he seemed human. More than human. He seemed handsome and she could swear that he was a real man.

'God,' the man's moan made her eyes move to his face and she moved a little on the sand to get closer to his face, not caring that her newly brought marine blue jeans will get sand on them.

'Sir?' she called again and placed a hand on his shoulder. She watched as his eyes slowly fluttered open and she moved even closer to him. Then it hit her. His eyes were so strange. They had no iris and their color was a strange shade of electrical blue. There was something whitey in them also, they seemed like thunders for him and it was frightening. She never saw a man with eyes like this before.

'Who are you?' he asked, his voice hoarse and his right hand slowly moving under him to support himself to can stand up, which was impossible in his state.

'I won't hurt you,' she began soothingly, her voice was like honey to his ears and he felt his muscles, involuntarily, relax. 'My name is Ororo. I was here, on the beach, when the wave brought you here. What happened? Are you hurt? And, my biggest question, are you a mutant?' she knew that the serie of questions might be frightening but she had to know.

'I remember that something hit me and I fell backwards. I hit the window and it broke, leaving me fall into the ocean.' He said and pursed his lips together. 'I don't know. Maybe. The fall was pretty bad. I mean, falling off a high stone can't be pleasant in anyway.' He added with a shrug. 'Mutant? Oh please, I might be Iron Man but I'm –' he stopped when he remembered the frightened faces of Pepper and Rhodes. 'I don't know. Am I?'

Ororo simply listened to him with huge attention and took a moment to check his eyes. 'Apparently,' she began and cleared her throat into her fist softly. 'You are a mutant. It seems that way but I can't be sure. That'd take tests.'

'That means hospitals.' He said and held up his free hand when he saw her lips part in an attempt to protest. 'They won't know what to do.' He explained and shook his head lightly.

'No hospitals but Professor Xavier's laboratory.' She said, looking into his eyes. Dark, chocolate eyes meeting the electrical blue color of his eyes. Despite the frightening color, she could see that his eyes were beautiful. The shape they had was the shape of eyes she always wished for her childrens. The man was beautiful, there was no doubt about it.

'Wait, the whole mutant academy thing? Is it, how is it called…The X-Men thing?' he asked with an arched brow. Of course, he knew about it, he had been reading about it but he never actually met one of them.

'Exactly,' she nodded and stood up. 'Now, if you want to get those tests done, you better get up, Mister…?' she trailed off, not knowing with what she should fill the empty place. '_Mister Handsome,_' a voice inside her mind whispered but she shook it off.

'Stark,' he said as he stood up from the ground with a bit of help from the black skinned woman. 'Tony Stark.' He added with a firm, confident smirk planted on his lips.


	4. Chapter 4

**Author's Note: **Here is the other chapter for this story too. _Friendships Never Die _had been updated as well.Now is the time to focus on this story too. Any ideas are welcome as always. Please don't forget to review. It'll make my day!

Tony didn't remember too much from the journey to institute. The only thing he remembered was that he got into a car with a woman. He couldn't remember what her name was even if he had the slight rememberance that she did told him her name. However, he was way too shaken to can remember those small details. The only thing he remembered was what brought him in this situation.

He remembered seeing his friend's face hoovering over him and then everything went too fast and strange. He remember as he fell into the cold ocean. He remembered as he felt the cold wind blow in his face before the iron hemlet came over to him. It everything was, God, so fast. He couldn't figure out why all those things happened. He just knew they did.

'Mr. Stark,' The chocolate skinned woman whispered as he shook his shoulder. Her skin and eyes color was remembering him of Rhodey. They could easily be siblings. What a strange resemblance.

'Yes?' He mumbled as he rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand. He noticed the woman flinch as he did that and then he felt two gentle fingers cover his wrist. He arched an eyebrow at her touch but immediately regreted it as he felt her fingers move away from his wrist.

'It's better if you don't touch your eyes. Is safer, I mean. We don't know what powers you might have.' She explained in a calm voice tone that made Tony feel safe. In a strange way but still, he felt safe. He felt like he could trust her because she was like him as well.

It was the first time Tony Stark did listened to anyone. He nodded, without making any other comment and placed his hands flat on his thighs. He drew in a few deep breathes then pushed the door of the car open and got out of its coffiness. He felt his eyes close for a moment as he breathed in the fresh air once again. It felt relaxing. It felt as if it was wiping away the events of the day.

'Come on, let's get you inside.' Ororo whispered calmly as she laid a hand on his upper arm. She understood him at perfection. She had lived her life between new mutants and she understood how hard it was for a normal man to transform into a monster. Because yes, most of the mutants were transforming into monsters if they didn't had the help they needed. It was awful.

Tony nodded softly before he took a cautious step toward the large house entrance. He felt his legs go weaker as he took another step and his hand shot up toward the nearby tree for support. He felt weak, as if he was going to fall from a second to the other. He drew in a deep breath and took yet another step toward the door, without success this time as he fell down on the cold cement of the road. He could hardly hear Ororo's voice calling out to him before his world faded to black once again.

'Have you found anything?' Pepper Potts asked, her voice hoarser than usual and her blue eyes bloodshot. They had started the searching for Tony ever since he fell in the ice cold ocean. Her rational mind was telling her to stop searching because he couldn't be alive. It would have been impossible for him to even swim because of the armor hand, so he couldn't have survived. Yet, she couldn't stop searching and hoping that he was naufragiated somewhere.

'No,' Rhodes said with a sad head shake. He sighed as he walked in silence to the piano Tony kept next to the window. His incredibly sad eyes fixing themselfes on a photo that occuiped a spot on top of the black piano. It was a photo of him and Tony. An old photo, from the time when Tony wasn't Iron Man but a weapon producer. A young and happy CEO and not a super-hero. Rhodes fingers curled around the frame of the photo and a sad smile began to form on his lips as he began to remember.

_'I'm not wearing this,' Rhodes stated and shook his head in denial. The head of another man poked from behind the Santa Claus suit and two dark brown eyes fixed themselfes on him._

_'For me? Please? It'll be fun!' Tony whined as he held up the Santa Claus suit. _

_There were only two days left until the Christmas came and Tony was planing on celebrating the holiday with his friends for the first time in his life. He decided to have a small party, only him, Rhodes, his faithful driver and Pepper. Yet, he wanted everyone to be dressed as for Christmas. He had picked up a red Santa suit for Rhodes, a elf suit for Pepper (whom he had to actually beg to wear) and a reindeer suit for Happy while he decided to take a snow man suit for himself. _

_'__Fine, but only this year.' Rhodes huffed as he grabbed the Santa suit from his overexcited friend. _

'Rhodey?' Pepper asked calmly as she noticed that the man stayed too long with the photo in his hand. She was worried about him. She had never seen him that destroyed before, not even when Tony was in Afghanistan. He was always being the optimist one but now...He was more than destroyed.

'I'm sorry.' He whispered as he placed the photo back on its spot on the piano. 'I'll find you, Tony. You'll be back home.' He added and brought two of his fingers to his lips, kissing them before placing them on the photo, right where Tony's head was. It was their gesture. Each time they'd promise something to each other, they'd kiss two fingers and place them over their hearts or over the thing they promised to do or protect and this was no exception for Rhodes.


End file.
